Macerating raw whole muscle meat pieces prior to further processing can improve the water holding capacity and the texture of the final meat product. Further, maceration increases the surface area of whole muscle meat pieces and may increase the rate of absorption of non-meat ingredients such as salt and flavorings. To increase the surface area, macerators use implements such as rotating blades, spiked teeth, or other protrusions to produce slight cuts, ruptures, or tears, or to stretch the surface. The protrusions may open up or stretch the whole muscle meat pieces merely by protruding into the muscle without aggressively working the meat or otherwise causing significant structural degradation to the whole muscle meat. The increase in surface area is, nonetheless, a physical action that results in increased protein solubility and improves the water holding capacity by exposing more binding sites for water molecules. As used herein, the term “raw whole muscle meat” describes meat that has not undergone significant processing and includes not only whole muscles but also smaller pieces or chunks. Some pieces are about the size of a fist, for example. The term “raw whole muscle meat” does not include ground meat or other meat of which the structural integrity has been substantially compromised by mechanical action.
It is well know to flatten meat, such as through pressing or pounding operations. In addition to macerating the meat by tenderizing and increasing the surface area, such flattening operations also resize the meat to provide a relatively uniform and consistent thickness, which helps ensure proper cooking of the meat. In other operations, meat pieces may be fed between a pair of counter-rotating shafts that have projections that press into the meat as the meat passes through the space between the shafts.
While the counter-rotating shafts are suited for processing meats of a similar size, such equipment is not typically suited to process meat pieces having a wide variety of sizes and configurations. Meat pieces are often divided among their relative sizes and then processed with similarly sized meats. This processing is done after the maceration equipment is calibrated to the size of meat pieces in a batch by adjusting the counter-rotating shafts. Alternatively differently sized meat pieces are sometimes processed together, then meat pieces requiring additional maceration are run through the counter-rotating shafts again. These approaches can be time consuming, inefficient, and impractical when working with certain large batches of meat.